Arduino based tank controller
 

G'day all,

So any other canreef'ers spending too much time reading tech jargon of late? I find myself heading down the road into insanity - building a DIY reef controller...

Picked up my freeduino SB today (just finished soldering it together - 20 minute project) along with the little bits & pieces to assemble the pH probe reader (less the probe) gotta order up my DS18B20's for temperature readings as active and MRO didn't have anything comparable...

In the process of figuring out my high voltage controls - how many plugs I want to directly control - pretty much decided today I'll just build the power center, rather than pay for an american DJ power center to hack...

Links for those who haven't heard of these projects:
http://reefprojects.com/wiki/Main_Page (wiki sucks but search finds tons of info)
http://delicathdesigns.com/LED/
http://richardorme1979.googlepages.com/home

Andy

AndyL

I'm also in the process of building my own controller using the Arduino 328. Purchased it a couple weeks back and just getting familiar with the coding.

Thanks for the links. I'll just take advantage of what others have written and change to my liking and re-post for others.

Which Arduino are you using for your aquarium controller ??

tagging along

interested too

freeduino sb is what i chose to go with - largely because we've got a local supplier here in calgary :) http://www.hvwtech.com/products_view.asp?ProductID=682 (turns out they have the ds18b20's too - thus i can get some progress this weekend)

was seriously thinking about the illuminato or the mega - but a bunch of reading last night made me realize the additional expense is completely unneeded, as there's an I2C port expander available to us... so those extra io's aren't a problem.

Grabbed the DS18B20's for temperature readings (looks like a transistor, i'm going to mount them into an aluminum probe scenario - then encase in epoxy for reef-safety...

Also grabbed a pair of photoelectric resistors - basically to confirm the lights are in fact on... how i'm going to tie those in... Not so sure :) Looks like I might need a 3rd shield with just an i2c port expander on it - as I'm going to run out of analog inputs quick at this rate...

Highly recomend HVW, these guys are great to deal with - extremely helpful thus far.

Hopefully I'll have the temp & pH circuits sorted this weekend.

Overall plan, is to connect the arduino to a wifi router running dd-wrt (fonera 2100 in my case) use it for the logging & give myself a web based front end similar to the wrrc project from reef central. Not a big fan of the LCD's at the tank - easier to just log into a nice webpage and see the graphs as to how/what things are happening than to try to pull that same info from a little lcd...

I just read through this and.....didnt understand a word of it:mrgreen::wink:

That probably means you should go with a AC Jr.. :wink:

What a frustrating weekend...

Got the ardiuno so it should be outputting to the router, had a bunch of configuring to do on the router to make this work... Somehow I bricked the router doing this :mrgreen: whoops; can't connect to it by wifi or ethernet anymore - so it's a whole new learning experience to see if I can't connect to it directly using the palm pilot (pretending to be a terminal) to reset things...

ah the fun of programming small electronic devices :D

AndyL,

sorry to hear your brick'd your router. there's got be a away to reset the router to its default values. Which router do you have ??

are you communicating with your network via ethernet or wifi ?? which Arduino shield are you using ??

did you write the source yourself or download the source ? can you please email me your source code.